The cigarette has long since cooled down to nothing. Just ash, inert and useless. Louis draws a finger through it, looking away from Lestat.
Senses the way Lestat is needling them towards familiar argument. Tries to decide before the decision is made for him, whether or not he cares to be led into a fight they've repeated time and again.
"How many times you promised me you'd do it?"
Over and over again. Louis, waiting, waiting, waiting.
Looks down at Antoinette, unmoving, cooling. The sign of his blood drinking on her neck. He had always liked to leave her marked, and she liked it too. Or pretended to. It didn't matter. She would take what he gave her, whether it was affection or something colder. She would give him—
Well. She wouldn't any longer.
"I couldn't part with her," an echo. Concession. "She gave me comfort. I've needed comfort. That is how it felt to me."
Because Louis broods. Claudia snipes. And Lestat needed to be fortified against them.
Louis wishes he'd never heard any of it, had never stood in the dark and listened to their talk, to the sound of their kissing. Claudia had been so terribly still, watching him, and Louis had felt—
He'd thanked Lestat. He'd felt real relief, thinking they could all three move forward together. That something had shifted, when nothing had.
"Comfort," falls from Louis' mouth like a stone.
It's been difficult. But has it always been? Was it difficult at the start?
"I know you don't care to hear it," comes out fast, but not as angry as it could. A fact, thrown Louis' way, more interested in escaping the accusation that Lestat hears in Louis' voice: what comfort does Lestat deserve, after all his mistakes? Of taking Louis' life from him, of taking Claudia's life from her, of letting Louis slip through his fingers, of his lies and failures to kill Antoinette, who always cared to hear it.
Not a matching gallery, of course. Lestat has his own. But he can imagine Louis', hanging these marks against him on pristine walls, to be perused at his leisure. Claudia, refusing to let him take any of them down.
"Are you going to leave me now?" comes out more shaky than he wanted.
Something piercing in it, this straight forward answer. Catching him. If he hadn't expected a yes, maybe Lestat would have anticipated silence, condemning silence. Another six year absence, maybe longer, a return to a prior sentencing now without Antoinette to assist in idling away the time. But Louis says no. Reaffirms it.
Lestat sits silent for a moment, considering him, then moves. Away from Antoinette's body, heedless of blood on the floor as he goes on hands and knees to where Louis is sitting.
Gentle, touching the side of his knee. "I love only you," he says. "I swear it."
He is still upset, he thinks, but it's dizzying how much of it seems to evaporate on contact of that news. That he has not lost Louis, that this wasn't some last punishment to see him properly alone. That Lestat is needed, and wanted. Feels some desperate, clawing thing in him that wants to drag Louis to the ground with him.
Restraint. Stays here kneeling at his feet, that one point of contact, and an unwavering focus. "Did you kill her," he starts, voice still tender in his throat, "to have me back to yourself?"
Louis isn't sure he believes this. He had said it aloud to Claudia, asserted it as truth. Lestat has said it before, delineating between Louis and she as if it were so simple.
He does know that he believes the rest of what he had told Claudia that night. That Lestat had his own demons, even if Louis doesn't know their names. That Lestat would have killed Antoinette if he thought Louis would have him as he was.
Louis cannot look at her corpse.
Instead, he looks into Lestat's face.
Tells him, "I don't like sharing you."
Won't ask this time if he is enough. Everything is too fragile to broach the topic.
No laughter, this time, but the scrape of the next exhale has something a little wry to it. Like, message received.
"Okay," Lestat says.
This is where he should swear it, he knows. And he will, he thinks. Not just because Antoinette is dead, as though she were irreplaceable to him, but something more broadly final in her crumpled body just near him. He swallows, a brief break in eye contact as he considers the thing he wants to say.
Well. There is nothing for it. He says, "I don't like to be squandered."
A little flush of emotion. Anger? Louis can't pin it down entirely.
"What's squandered?"
It goes hand in hand with the jabby I know you don't care to hear it Lestat had offered earlier, Louis knows. Some little hurt that Lestat has carried along with him, something Louis can guess at the shape of but pushes to hear him say aloud.
An answering clutch of feeling, also only possibly anger. Disbelief at the question being asked, the way it's asked, a briefly out of body experience where knees set on floorboards go numb, weightless and anchored only by that grip to Louis' knee.
"I," Lestat says, deliberately, a telling quaver to his tone that speaks of wrangled control, "have devoted all of myself to you. Every second, every inch, every thought I have. You don't see it."
There is a steely conviction to these words, never mind he is saying them in the home of his now dead on-and-off again mistress of twenty years.
"Time and time again, you discard me. Not unfairly," his grip, hardening, "but sometimes unfairly."
Aware, maybe, of the utility of pressing the issue. That maybe if they have it out, they can leave it behind them.
But Louis is very aware of where they are too. Of Antoinette's body on the floor behind Lestat.
"When?" he invites. Doesn't attempt to flex his leg out of Lestat's grasp. "When did I throw you away?"
Long years locked inside together, Louis eaten up by grief over Claudia. Before, walking out, leaving Lestat to Antoinette. Louis' thoughts circle and skid away from these moments, away from guesses.
Seven years, these complaints thrown against the brick wall of Louis' misery, and then a fight, and then the long time away, and then no room at all for complaint beyond the petty. Unshed crimson replenishes itself. Some small hurt, Louis had imagined.
"Seven years you barely spoke to me, scarcely looked at me, never mind anything more. And it was then that I went back to her," having already failed to kill her, it's true, but that same night he'd promised to do it soon, Claudia had fled. "And you watched me go. You allowed it. You didn't care."
His voice splinters there. Anger, shame, sorrow, all of those things.
"She was gone," comes almost without conscious intent. "Our daughter."
Sister tossed aside, the two of them alone in this room without daughter in question to object.
Louis had blamed Lestat. But the reality is—
"And it was me. She went running from me. You holding that against me?"
Side-stepping. But Louis doesn't know what else to say. He'd fallen into a black hole. He knows it. Couldn't find his way from it. That is still in him. Brooding, Lestat had said. Louis broods. Sorrow comes too easy.
"She was gone," and on his feet, a too-smooth flowing of movement by the time the crack of his voice is loud enough to strike the walls around them, "and I was there."
A not unfamiliar burst of tearful rage. A corpse on the ground, ignored. The smell of spilled blood, fresh death, ignored. Louis' words, catching back up, and Lestat's smile is more grimace than anything else as he flips a hand at him.
"And you held it against me. Over and over, you said this."
"You pushed her," bursts out of him. Retreading, falling back into the old argument. Lestat rises and Louis doesn't, held in place by some flinch of a thing in his body that hasn't quite fractured enough to forget—
There was a time when Louis met him where Lestat landed. Lestat pushed and Louis pushed back.
He'd stopped doing that, after the fall. Refrains from it now.
"You pushed me out too, when I wouldn't—I couldn't forget her."
Lestat, quick to suggest the dismantling of Claudia's room. Quicker to dismiss the possibility of her return. Stranded Louis alone with his grief.
Old hurts. Lestat's raised voice. Louis winding tenser, bracing unconsciously against it.
"She," a dramatic first syllable, a pointed finger, "was acting a menace who required discipline, and it was you who pushed me away while she spiralled beyond our control. Out the door, out of town."
They've had this fight. Echoing around their increasingly cluttered townhouse, usually smothered out when someone's patience extinguishes. Some other wound, now, bleeding freely beneath the surface. Confessing on his knees to his feelings of abandonment, dismissed. Claudia, Claudia, Claudia.
"And then you hid in it, your sorrow. I could not come near it without some nasty little comment, or better yet, your silence. La putain de tempête sans fin de ton silence."
Maybe he hadn't noticed that first time, but he had noticed later. A terrible ugly resentment for Lestat's absence, for seeking amusements elsewhere when Louis could do nothing but hoard his miseries like pale gold.
The chair scrapes, shoved back as Louis stands. A defensive movement, getting to his feet. Refusing to look up any longer.
"You pushed. You wanted to push her out like she were never there."
Teetering away from the thing Louis knows they're meant to address. This is familiar ground. Easy swipes, easy wounds. Antoinette is dead and they are here, digging claws into each other again.
Louis had punished him. He knows this to be true. But Lestat had left. Had been bored of him before Claudia went, was bored of him while she was gone, was tired of him now. The question doesn't bear asking. Louis hadn't been enough. Maybe would never be.
"Years!" he barks back. "Years I spent, waiting, before I sought something other than the misery of our home."
Something other than. Antoinette, dead on the floor, while they argue over her. Lestat steals a glance to her, it, to it, the object on the floor, braces against the sobbed feeling in his chest, willing it not to break. Someone who did love him, who was free to show it, dead now.
But that's not a sorrow he can reveal here. For all that Louis says he can't leave him, won't, wants and needs him.
"And that isn't true," comes out quieter. Forlorn. "I missed her as well. Not that you could look up for a moment to see it."
A thing better left unsaid. It claws too directly at the thing in Louis' chest, jealous and hurt and angry and shamed all at once.
Antoinette, possessed of all things Louis was not.
No immediate rejoinder. Louis, visibly struggling with himself. With old hurt. With new ones. With the miserable distrust that says how could he know for certain Lestat had been years away from this little apartment, waiting for Louis to emerge from the deep pit of his misery?
"You didn't show it to me."
Unfair, maybe. Louis had been drowning. Had blamed himself, blamed Lestat in turn. Hadn't had the eyes to see, couldn't say for certain what had been there then.
That Louis pauses, appears to struggle, stops Lestat from saying the easy things. That Louis was himself blind to it, absorbed in his own misery, guarded by blame and so ready to bring it to bear, and so on. Accusations and old wounds.
But the thing Louis says is true besides. Any hurt over Claudia hidden, a habit for concealment. And besides, "I was angry," with a small gesture. "At her, at you. Myself, certainly." His fury that had maintained by the time she stepped through their door, not ready to forgive her for the ruin she had made of his family, and then—
Well, she had stated her intentions then. No chance for reconciliation.
"And yes, I wished for us to be happy again. I wished for you to look up and see that I was there and be glad for it. But it was only resentment. Hatred, even. What was there for me to show when you despised me?"
They're years late to this argument. Years too late for Louis to express what Lestat surely knows: that Louis couldn't be happy, couldn't stand the thought of either of them being happy with Claudia gone.
And he does struggle, in this moment. Struggles with anger, with resentment. Emotion breaking through thick layers of ice.
"I couldn't be happy. Couldn't, without her."
Unclear if he can be find his happiness now, if doing this will change anything. How long until his melancholy becomes intolerable? Until Lestat finds another?
A minor shift, side-stepping away. Antoinette's body still on the floor. Louis creating space between them.
'And you were sick of me. You still are," leads inevitably to: "I heard you. It weren't just then."
Feels despair like a cold knife. Louis, discontent. Claudia's companionship, outstripping the value of Lestat's alone. Its an ugly kind of jealousy, envying a child's love for her father, that father's love for his child, but in all the tangling configurations—sister, daughter, infant death—it is the two of them, and he is a third.
This is how it seems. Unfair, first, and now inevitable. Claudia has never hurt Louis. Louis has never hurt Claudia. Lestat is quiet, first, before drawing in a breath.
"All of it," lacks specificity. A choice. Heat cooling from Louis' voice.
He could repeat it. Could pull out what he'd heard, how it hooked all the way back, six years, seven years, back to Claudia spitting venom across the room as she pulled the veil from Louis' eyes. The housewife, and the mistake.
"You want me to hear it?" is only a question on a technicality. "You want me to find you with her?"
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Senses the way Lestat is needling them towards familiar argument. Tries to decide before the decision is made for him, whether or not he cares to be led into a fight they've repeated time and again.
"How many times you promised me you'd do it?"
Over and over again. Louis, waiting, waiting, waiting.
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Looks down at Antoinette, unmoving, cooling. The sign of his blood drinking on her neck. He had always liked to leave her marked, and she liked it too. Or pretended to. It didn't matter. She would take what he gave her, whether it was affection or something colder. She would give him—
Well. She wouldn't any longer.
"I couldn't part with her," an echo. Concession. "She gave me comfort. I've needed comfort. That is how it felt to me."
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Louis wishes he'd never heard any of it, had never stood in the dark and listened to their talk, to the sound of their kissing. Claudia had been so terribly still, watching him, and Louis had felt—
He'd thanked Lestat. He'd felt real relief, thinking they could all three move forward together. That something had shifted, when nothing had.
"Comfort," falls from Louis' mouth like a stone.
It's been difficult. But has it always been? Was it difficult at the start?
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Not a matching gallery, of course. Lestat has his own. But he can imagine Louis', hanging these marks against him on pristine walls, to be perused at his leisure. Claudia, refusing to let him take any of them down.
"Are you going to leave me now?" comes out more shaky than he wanted.
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Would he be stronger this time? Hold out for ten years instead of six?
Louis leans forward in the chair, elbows on his knees. Watches Lestat over Antoinette's corpse.
"No," Louis admits. Why pretend otherwise? Why pretend he won't have Lestat, even now? "I ain't leaving."
So perhaps the question becomes:
"You gonna stay?"
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Lestat sits silent for a moment, considering him, then moves. Away from Antoinette's body, heedless of blood on the floor as he goes on hands and knees to where Louis is sitting.
Gentle, touching the side of his knee. "I love only you," he says. "I swear it."
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It is only Louis.
"You swear it," is quiet acknowledgement. Affirming it to himself, this thing Louis knows but had never quite settled.
He is hyperaware of Lestat's fingers, a light touch through the fabric of Louis' pant leg.
"I ain't as much fun as her," is an understatement. "But I need you."
Amends to, "I want you."
On the way to, "And I'll take you this way. Any way I can have you."
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He is still upset, he thinks, but it's dizzying how much of it seems to evaporate on contact of that news. That he has not lost Louis, that this wasn't some last punishment to see him properly alone. That Lestat is needed, and wanted. Feels some desperate, clawing thing in him that wants to drag Louis to the ground with him.
Restraint. Stays here kneeling at his feet, that one point of contact, and an unwavering focus. "Did you kill her," he starts, voice still tender in his throat, "to have me back to yourself?"
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Louis isn't sure he believes this. He had said it aloud to Claudia, asserted it as truth. Lestat has said it before, delineating between Louis and she as if it were so simple.
He does know that he believes the rest of what he had told Claudia that night. That Lestat had his own demons, even if Louis doesn't know their names. That Lestat would have killed Antoinette if he thought Louis would have him as he was.
Louis cannot look at her corpse.
Instead, he looks into Lestat's face.
Tells him, "I don't like sharing you."
Won't ask this time if he is enough. Everything is too fragile to broach the topic.
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"Okay," Lestat says.
This is where he should swear it, he knows. And he will, he thinks. Not just because Antoinette is dead, as though she were irreplaceable to him, but something more broadly final in her crumpled body just near him. He swallows, a brief break in eye contact as he considers the thing he wants to say.
Well. There is nothing for it. He says, "I don't like to be squandered."
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A little flush of emotion. Anger? Louis can't pin it down entirely.
"What's squandered?"
It goes hand in hand with the jabby I know you don't care to hear it Lestat had offered earlier, Louis knows. Some little hurt that Lestat has carried along with him, something Louis can guess at the shape of but pushes to hear him say aloud.
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"I," Lestat says, deliberately, a telling quaver to his tone that speaks of wrangled control, "have devoted all of myself to you. Every second, every inch, every thought I have. You don't see it."
There is a steely conviction to these words, never mind he is saying them in the home of his now dead on-and-off again mistress of twenty years.
"Time and time again, you discard me. Not unfairly," his grip, hardening, "but sometimes unfairly."
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Aware, maybe, of the utility of pressing the issue. That maybe if they have it out, they can leave it behind them.
But Louis is very aware of where they are too. Of Antoinette's body on the floor behind Lestat.
"When?" he invites. Doesn't attempt to flex his leg out of Lestat's grasp. "When did I throw you away?"
Long years locked inside together, Louis eaten up by grief over Claudia. Before, walking out, leaving Lestat to Antoinette. Louis' thoughts circle and skid away from these moments, away from guesses.
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Seven years, these complaints thrown against the brick wall of Louis' misery, and then a fight, and then the long time away, and then no room at all for complaint beyond the petty. Unshed crimson replenishes itself. Some small hurt, Louis had imagined.
"Seven years you barely spoke to me, scarcely looked at me, never mind anything more. And it was then that I went back to her," having already failed to kill her, it's true, but that same night he'd promised to do it soon, Claudia had fled. "And you watched me go. You allowed it. You didn't care."
His voice splinters there. Anger, shame, sorrow, all of those things.
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"She was gone," comes almost without conscious intent. "Our daughter."
Sister tossed aside, the two of them alone in this room without daughter in question to object.
Louis had blamed Lestat. But the reality is—
"And it was me. She went running from me. You holding that against me?"
Side-stepping. But Louis doesn't know what else to say. He'd fallen into a black hole. He knows it. Couldn't find his way from it. That is still in him. Brooding, Lestat had said. Louis broods. Sorrow comes too easy.
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A not unfamiliar burst of tearful rage. A corpse on the ground, ignored. The smell of spilled blood, fresh death, ignored. Louis' words, catching back up, and Lestat's smile is more grimace than anything else as he flips a hand at him.
"And you held it against me. Over and over, you said this."
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There was a time when Louis met him where Lestat landed. Lestat pushed and Louis pushed back.
He'd stopped doing that, after the fall. Refrains from it now.
"You pushed me out too, when I wouldn't—I couldn't forget her."
Lestat, quick to suggest the dismantling of Claudia's room. Quicker to dismiss the possibility of her return. Stranded Louis alone with his grief.
Old hurts. Lestat's raised voice. Louis winding tenser, bracing unconsciously against it.
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They've had this fight. Echoing around their increasingly cluttered townhouse, usually smothered out when someone's patience extinguishes. Some other wound, now, bleeding freely beneath the surface. Confessing on his knees to his feelings of abandonment, dismissed. Claudia, Claudia, Claudia.
"And then you hid in it, your sorrow. I could not come near it without some nasty little comment, or better yet, your silence. La putain de tempête sans fin de ton silence."
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Antoinette. Antoinette who is no more.
Maybe he hadn't noticed that first time, but he had noticed later. A terrible ugly resentment for Lestat's absence, for seeking amusements elsewhere when Louis could do nothing but hoard his miseries like pale gold.
The chair scrapes, shoved back as Louis stands. A defensive movement, getting to his feet. Refusing to look up any longer.
"You pushed. You wanted to push her out like she were never there."
Teetering away from the thing Louis knows they're meant to address. This is familiar ground. Easy swipes, easy wounds. Antoinette is dead and they are here, digging claws into each other again.
Louis had punished him. He knows this to be true. But Lestat had left. Had been bored of him before Claudia went, was bored of him while she was gone, was tired of him now. The question doesn't bear asking. Louis hadn't been enough. Maybe would never be.
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Something other than. Antoinette, dead on the floor, while they argue over her. Lestat steals a glance to her, it, to it, the object on the floor, braces against the sobbed feeling in his chest, willing it not to break. Someone who did love him, who was free to show it, dead now.
But that's not a sorrow he can reveal here. For all that Louis says he can't leave him, won't, wants and needs him.
"And that isn't true," comes out quieter. Forlorn. "I missed her as well. Not that you could look up for a moment to see it."
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A thing better left unsaid. It claws too directly at the thing in Louis' chest, jealous and hurt and angry and shamed all at once.
Antoinette, possessed of all things Louis was not.
No immediate rejoinder. Louis, visibly struggling with himself. With old hurt. With new ones. With the miserable distrust that says how could he know for certain Lestat had been years away from this little apartment, waiting for Louis to emerge from the deep pit of his misery?
"You didn't show it to me."
Unfair, maybe. Louis had been drowning. Had blamed himself, blamed Lestat in turn. Hadn't had the eyes to see, couldn't say for certain what had been there then.
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But the thing Louis says is true besides. Any hurt over Claudia hidden, a habit for concealment. And besides, "I was angry," with a small gesture. "At her, at you. Myself, certainly." His fury that had maintained by the time she stepped through their door, not ready to forgive her for the ruin she had made of his family, and then—
Well, she had stated her intentions then. No chance for reconciliation.
"And yes, I wished for us to be happy again. I wished for you to look up and see that I was there and be glad for it. But it was only resentment. Hatred, even. What was there for me to show when you despised me?"
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And he does struggle, in this moment. Struggles with anger, with resentment. Emotion breaking through thick layers of ice.
"I couldn't be happy. Couldn't, without her."
Unclear if he can be find his happiness now, if doing this will change anything. How long until his melancholy becomes intolerable? Until Lestat finds another?
A minor shift, side-stepping away. Antoinette's body still on the floor. Louis creating space between them.
'And you were sick of me. You still are," leads inevitably to: "I heard you. It weren't just then."
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Feels despair like a cold knife. Louis, discontent. Claudia's companionship, outstripping the value of Lestat's alone. Its an ugly kind of jealousy, envying a child's love for her father, that father's love for his child, but in all the tangling configurations—sister, daughter, infant death—it is the two of them, and he is a third.
This is how it seems. Unfair, first, and now inevitable. Claudia has never hurt Louis. Louis has never hurt Claudia. Lestat is quiet, first, before drawing in a breath.
"What did you hear?"
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He could repeat it. Could pull out what he'd heard, how it hooked all the way back, six years, seven years, back to Claudia spitting venom across the room as she pulled the veil from Louis' eyes. The housewife, and the mistake.
"You want me to hear it?" is only a question on a technicality. "You want me to find you with her?"
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